Harvard Doesn’t Want You

Taken from Vol. 49, Issue 1 of my schoool publication Cuspidor.

High school is quite a unique time for making friends. You have a group of people around you all the time with whom you talk with, hang out, and stress over work– school being the primary way you cultivate that sense of camaraderie. However, there comes a time in every student’s life where they notice an unfortunate truth: Though a few deny it, most see the primary purpose of high school as getting into a good university. Unfortunately, if your goal is acceptance to an elite or international school, that means the friends you’ve made for the last 5 years are now your competition. What was once a community built on camaraderie is now an awful zero-sum game that you’re all forced to play.

So how do you separate yourself from your peers? To put it bluntly, you work yourself to the bone. Get perfect marks, twelve APs, leadership positions, community service, achievements, just do it all.

I’ve always hated this culture of fake meritocracy. I mean, I’ve been a math kid for all my life, attending prep classes every weekend to score just a few points higher on a few important contests. The path laid out for me was simple: write the best contests in the world to beat the best people in the world, and get into the best schools in the world as a result. At one point though, I realized that nothing I was learning would ever really be useful in the real world. Solving abstract geometry problems might have been useful in math contents, but I never paid any attention to the skills I needed for everything else in life. It felt like I was doing it, just for the sake of doing it.

Most of you are probably familiar with the “prep school” culture that’s central to most of our lives. Especially amongst the Asian community, it’s been drilled into us from a young age to excel at anything and everything academic. One moment which showed me this in particular was seeing prep schools offering classes designed specifically for the UTS entrance exam. Now, I took a class to study SSAT vocab back then, but this was different. These were entire courses solely dedicated to writing the best essays or coming up with the best responses to interview questions, just so students could get into my school.

It felt awfully fake to me.

After all, wasn’t the purpose of those interviews and essays to see who you really were? I was watching hundreds of sixth-graders sitting in a room, learning how to craft the perfect facade of themselves in front of interviewers just to get to where we are now. It triggered the same feeling I had about math contests: people were doing it just to do it. There was no consideration of actual life skills or meaningful self reflection, it just felt like a disingenuous attempt to push yourself one step ahead of your peers.

Now, the reason I mention this anecdote is because of the striking similarity it has with the university application process. Parents will pay thousands of dollars to consultants that pick the best courses for their kids in high school, essentially molding them into the ideal applicant for Ivy Leagues. Students will pull all-nighters just to cram themselves with extra courses, sign up for every extracurricular, and throw their work-life balances out the window for a better looking resume. Unfortunately, people are still doing things for the sake of doing them. Gone is the era of passions or personal fulfillment. You do what everyone else is doing, what makes your mom’s WeChat group jealous, and what will finally make that admissions officer like you.

I’ve talked to many students who actually got into elite universities, and they all share the same regret: beating themselves up in high school over things they never really cared about. What set them apart wasn’t the eleventh AP they took or the charity they made on the side, it was the things they learned because they enjoyed learning it, or the skills they’ve developed and been passionate about for years. I still write math contests because I enjoy the challenges and experiences that come with them, not because I think it’ll be my golden ticket to America. None of this is to say, however, that you shouldn’t work hard⁠—you should, but reconsider what you’re working for. Spend time with your friends instead of seeing them as competitors you need to one-up. The triumphs that you’ll remember are the ones you actually care about, not the ones you did for a resume.

At the end of the day, there’s more to life than an Ivy League university or bragging rights for your parents. Let’s go back to doing things because we actually want to.